KAN We Flow? Advancing Robotic Manipulation with 3D Flow Matching via KAN & RWKV
On the map: Diffusion models → Diffusion and flow policies for robotics
Abstract (arXiv)
Diffusion-based visuomotor policies excel at modeling action distributions but are inference-inefficient, since recursively denoising from noise to policy requires many steps and heavy UNet backbones, which hinders deployment on resource-constrained robots. Flow matching alleviates the sampling burden by learning a one-step vector field, yet prior implementations still inherit large UNet-style architectures. In this work, we present KAN-We-Flow, a flow-matching policy that draws on recent advances in Receptance Weighted Key Value (RWKV) and Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KAN) from vision to build a lightweight and highly expressive backbone for 3D manipulation. Concretely, we introduce an RWKV-KAN block: an RWKV first performs efficient time/channel mixing to propagate task context, and a subsequent GroupKAN layer applies learnable spline-based, groupwise functional mappings to perform feature-wise nonlinear calibration of the action mapping on RWKV outputs. Moreover, we introduce an Action Consistency Regularization (ACR), a lightweight auxiliary loss that enforces alignment between predicted action trajectories and expert demonstrations via Euler extrapolation, providing additional supervision to stabilize training and improve policy precision. Without resorting to large UNets, our design reduces parameters by 86.8%, maintains fast runtime, and achieves state-of-the-art success rates on Adroit, Meta-World, and DexArt benchmarks. Our project page can be viewed in hrefhttps://zhihaochen-2003.github.io/KAN-We-Flow.github.io/textcolorredlink
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Diffusion and flow policies for robotics, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models. Builds on 35 of its 41 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 1 Feb 2026.
Builds on
35 of 41 references.
Closest ancestors · 10
Same direction, newest first
- 20253D FlowMatch Actor: Unified 3D Policy for Single- and Dual-Arm Manipulation14 Aug
- 2025MTDP: A Modulated Transformer based Diffusion Policy Model13 Feb
- 2024FlowPolicy: Enabling Fast and Robust 3D Flow-based Policy via Consistency Flow Matching for Robot Manipulation6 Dec
- 2024Diffusion Transformer Policy21 Oct
- 2024The Ingredients for Robotic Diffusion Transformers14 Oct
- 2024Mamba Policy: Towards Efficient 3D Diffusion Policy with Hybrid Selective State Models11 Sep
- 2024ManiCM: Real-time 3D Diffusion Policy via Consistency Model for Robotic Manipulation3 Jun
- 2024Hierarchical Diffusion Policy for Kinematics-Aware Multi-Task Robotic Manipulation6 Mar
- 2023DiffAIL: Diffusion Adversarial Imitation Learning11 Dec
- 2023Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusion7 Mar
Other references · 25
- 2020An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scalecited by 29,915
- 2023Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spacescited by 4,616
- 2019Meta-World: A Benchmark and Evaluation for Multi-Task and Meta Reinforcement Learningcited by 1,168
- 2021What Matters in Learning from Offline Human Demonstrations for Robot Manipulationcited by 699
- 2017Learning Complex Dexterous Manipulation with Deep Reinforcement Learning and Demonstrationscited by 685
- 2021Implicit Behavioral Cloningcited by 442
- 2024U-KAN Makes Strong Backbone for Medical Image Segmentation and Generationcited by 176
- 2024Vision-RWKV: Efficient and Scalable Visual Perception with RWKV-Like Architecturescited by 97
- 2024Controllable Generation with Text-to-Image Diffusion Models: A Surveycited by 82
- 2023Teach a Robot to FISH: Versatile Imitation from One Minute of Demonstrationscited by 74
- 2024A Survey on Kolmogorov-Arnold Networkcited by 67
- 2023DexArt: Benchmarking Generalizable Dexterous Manipulation with Articulated Objectscited by 64
13 more
- 2024AdaFlow: Imitation Learning with Variance-Adaptive Flow-Based Policiescited by 50
- 2024Diffusion-RWKV: Scaling RWKV-Like Architectures for Diffusion Modelscited by 41
- 2024RISE: 3D Perception Makes Real-World Robot Imitation Simple and Effectivecited by 41
- 2023Dexterous Functional Graspingcited by 36
- 20253DFlowAction: Learning Cross-Embodiment Manipulation from 3D Flow World Modelcited by 36
- 2025MP1: MeanFlow Tames Policy Learning in 1-step for Robotic Manipulationcited by 32
- 2024rKAN: Rational Kolmogorov-Arnold Networkscited by 31
- 2025FP3: A 3D Foundation Policy for Robotic Manipulationcited by 31
- 2025Embodied AI: From LLMs to World Modelscited by 23
- 2025FreqPolicy: Efficient Flow-based Visuomotor Policy via Frequency Consistencycited by 13
- 2023Large-Scale Person Detection and Localization using Overhead Fisheye Camerascited by 12
- 2023Image is All You Need to Empower Large-scale Diffusion Models for In-Domain Generationcited by 7
- 2022ManiFlow: Implicitly Representing Manifolds with Normalizing Flowscited by 2
Built on by
Not cited yet.
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026Flowing With Purpose: Latent Action Guided Flow Matching Policies For Robotic Manipulation
- 2026Trajectory-Consistent Flow Matching for Robust Visuomotor Policy Learning
- 20253D Flow Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Generating Flow in 3D Space
- 2025FlowRAM: Grounding Flow Matching Policy with Region-Aware Mamba Framework for Robotic Manipulation
- 2026ProbeFlow: Training-Free Adaptive Flow Matching for Vision-Language-Action Models
- 2026SnapFlow: One-Step Action Generation for Flow-Matching VLAs via Progressive Self-Distillation
- 2026CoLA-Flow Policy: Temporally Coherent Imitation Learning via Continuous Latent Action Flow Matching for Robotic Manipulation
- 2025DM1: MeanFlow with Dispersive Regularization for 1-Step Robotic Manipulation